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The brutality and
fecklessness of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan have been laid bare in an indisputable
way just days before the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on
whether to throw $33.5 billion more into the Afghan quagmire, when that money
is badly needed at home.

On Sunday, the Web site Wikileaks posted 75,000
reports written mostly by U.S. forces in Afghanistan during a six-year period
from January 2004 to December 2009. The authenticity of the material
published under the title "Afghan War Diaries"
is not in doubt.

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, speaking at a TED conference

The New York Times,
which received an embargoed version of the documents from Wikileaks, devoted
six pages of its Monday editions to several
articles on the disclosures, which reveal how the Afghan War slid into its
current morass while the Bush administration concentrated U.S. military efforts
on Iraq.

Wikileaks also gave advanced copies to the British
newspaper, The Guardian, and
the German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel,
thus guaranteeing that the U.S. Fawning Corporate Media could not ignore these
classified cables the way it did five years ago with the "Downing Street Memo,"
a leaked British document which described how intelligence was
"fixed" around President George W. Bush's determination to invade
Iraq.

The Washington
Post also led its Monday editions with a lengthy article about the
Wikileaks' disclosure of the Afghan War reports.

Still, it remains to be seen whether the new evidence
of a foundering war in Afghanistan will lead to a public groundswell of
opposition to expending more billions of dollars there when the money is so
critically needed to help people to keep their jobs, their homes and their
personal dignity in the United States.

But there may be new hope that the House of
Representatives will find the collective courage to deny further funding for
feckless bloodshed in Afghanistan that seems more designed to protect political
flanks in Washington than the military perimeters of U.S. bases over there.

Assange on
Pentagon Papers

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Wikileaks leader Julian Assange compared the release
of "The Afghan War Diaries" to Daniel Ellsberg's release in 1971 of the
Pentagon Papers. Those classified documents revealed the duplicitous arguments
used to justify the Vietnam War and played an important role in eventually
getting Congress to cut off funding.

Ellsberg's courageous act was the subject of a recent
Oscar-nominated documentary, entitled "The Most Dangerous Man in America,"
named after one of the less profane sobriquets thrown Ellsberg's way by
then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

I imagine Dan is happy at this point to cede that
particular honorific to the Wikileaks' leaker, who is suspected of being Pfc.
Bradley Manning, a young intelligence specialist in Iraq who was recently
detained and charged with leaking classified material to Wikileaks.

An earlier Wikileaks' disclosure also reportedly
from Manning revealed video of a U.S. helicopter crew cavalierly gunning down
about a dozen Iraqi men, including two Reuters journalists, as they walked
along a Baghdad street.

Wikileaks declined to say whether Manning was the
source of the material. However, possibly to counter accusations that the
leaker (allegedly Manning) acted recklessly in releasing thousands of secret
military records, Wikileaks said it was still withholding 15,000 reports "as
part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source."

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After Ellsberg was identified as the Pentagon Papers
leaker in 1971, he was indicted and faced a long prison sentence if convicted.
However, a federal judge threw out the charges following disclosures of the
Nixon administration's own abuses, such as a break-in at the office of
Ellsberg's psychiatrist.

In public speeches over the past several years,
Ellsberg has been vigorously pressing for someone to do what he did, this time
on the misbegotten wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ellsberg also has praised
Assange for providing a means for the documents to reach the public.

Ellsberg and other members of The Truth Telling
Coalition established on Sept. 9, 2004, have been appealing to government officials
who encounter "deception and cover-up" on vital issues to opt for "unauthorized
truth telling." [At the end of this story, see full text of the group's letter,
which I signed.]

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for 27 years, and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). His (more...)